I've been considering the idea of adopting the Freescale (a.k.a. Motorola) MPC870 processor for a board requiring ethernet, serial, USB (host and device), I2C and SPI connectivity, among other things. The processor would run FPGA-based signal processing hardware on the same board, handle configuration, firmware uploading and remote control/monitoring functions.
One of the interesting things about this family of processors is that, I am told, they will run a version of Linux. This, to me, means that a huge body of work is already done and one can concentrate on application-specific code.
The current version of the board has a Cygnal (whatever they are called now)
8051 high-speed derivative. Implementing sophisticated connectivity is rather painful using this device. Here hardware cost is not as important as development speed and the ability to work at a higher level of abstraction.I'm looking for opinon as to the capabilities of these Freescale processors and, perhaps, suggestions for other devices I should be looking at.
Thanks,